Composting at Lane Community College

Lane's composting program began in 2004 when Recycling began collecting food scraps from Food Services and composting them in an Earth Tub in vessel composter (image below).  That year, Lane recycled approximately 13 tons of food scraps.  In 2012-13, Lane Community College composted over 36 tons of food waste and compostable material. In the past ten years, Lane Community College composted 168 tons of food waste and compostable material.

Today, Lane composts not only food scraps from all food producing locations but also offers full-service composting, which includes plates, utenstil, cups, and more. Please see the image below:

Our compostables now get loaded into a 20 cubic yard container and hauled to Rexuis Forest Products to be made into compost.  Even with our successful composting efforts approximately a third of our outgoing waste is compostable.  This is a challegning stream to manage.  Please place only compostables purchased at Lane in the bins.  We are only allowed a small amount of non-compostable contamination in our compostables.  Contact Recycling if you have questions.

Images above (from left to right): sorted compostables, attaching the hopper to the forklift, and dumping the hopper into the 20 yard container for trucking to Rexius.